Tag: Determinism

Science News has a fascinating — if brain splitting — look at research by Princeton mathematicians John Conway and Simon Kochen who are trying to defend free will in what looks like a completely deterministic universe,

Conway and Kochen say this search [for variables that would determine the outcome of quantum-level events] is hopeless, and they claim to have proven that indeterminacy is inherent in the world itself, rather than just in quantum theory. And to Bohmians and other like-minded physicists, the pair says: Give up determinism, or give up free will. Even the tiniest bit of free will.

. . .

Kochen and Conway say the best way out of this paradox is to accept that the particle’s spin doesn’t exist until it’s measured. But there’s one way to escape their noose: Suppose for a moment that Alice and Bob’s choice of axis to measure is not a free choice. Then Nature could be conspiring to prevent them from choosing the axes that will reveal the violation of the rule. Kochen and Conway can’t rule that possibility out entirely, but Kochen says, “A man on the street would say, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ A natural feeling is, of course, that what we do, we do of our own free will. Not completely, but certainly to the point of knowing we can choose what button to push in an experiment.”

Nobel Prize winning physicist Gerard ’t Hooft retorts to this that Kochen and Conway are correct, but that they’ve simply come down on the wrong side of the argument — there simply isn’t even a tiny bit of free will in the universe.

“As a determined determinist I would say that yes, you bet, an experimenter’s choice what to measure was fixed from the dawn of time, and so were the properties of the thing he decided to call a photon,” ’t Hooft says. “If you believe in determinism, you have to believe it all the way. No escape possible. Conway and Kochen have shown here in a beautiful way that a half-hearted belief in pseudo-determinism is impossible to sustain.”

It is telling that Kochen ultimately has to appeal to the phenomenology of consciousness and talk about “natural feelings” to attempt to convince us — and perhaps himself — that we really do have free will in deciding whether or not to push that button. That’s not exactly a convincing theoretical framework to base free will on.

One of these days I’m going to write a longer review, but I’d recommend Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves which makes a fairly lucid (though still brain straining) case for a compatibilist approach between determinism and free will and does an especially good job of highlighting how much of the debate over free will vs. determinism is predicated on hidden assumptions in the way we talk about freedom and deciding.